orders were put forward and where political demonstrations and military parades alternated with free leisure activities including balloon launches, kite-flying or temporary encampments of circuses and fairs.47 Still, the centre of our attention remains primarily the form of the spectacle as an architectonic landmark formulating the panorama of a locality or even the entire city.
even towards the end of the brief period of Socialist Realism in architecture in the mid1950s the plan for a high-rise landmark was subjected to severe criticism. Nonetheless, just one decade later new proposals were made for supplementing the built fabric with a vertical element, following the ideas of Emanuel Hruška, who regarded the development of urban design in this period as the “sculptural modelling of the city”, in which a “tower-form would reinforce the silhouette of dispersed construction”.52
‘Sculptural Modelling’ of the Land The ideas of verticality and panorama formation in this part of the city made their appearance even in the inter-war years, when Balán and Grossman speculated in 1926 in connection with building a modern centre on “some kind of skyscrapers”.48 However, in their perspectival renderings these two Czech architects presented more of a low-lying historicist form of public structures than the commercial “skyscrapers” of an Americanized downtown. As such, until the end of World War II, the dominant vertical form in the locality was the six-storey Eugen Jelínek apartment block by architect Emil Brüll,49 exceeded only later by the elevenstorey monumental volume of the Postal Palace. Nonetheless, another high-rise landmark was proposed by 1950 for the area, intended as the headquarters of the Slovak Planning Office.50 It would have been a typical tower-form of the era, “created as the striking vertical dominant of the surroundings and the entire city.”51 Yet
A requirement for creating a focal landmark in the locality was likewise declared by the jury of the competition for the central radio building in 1963. As the impulse towards the building of Bratislava’s modern centre, the radio building needed to determine the visual silhouette of the locality. Toward this end, the project chosen for realisation was the design from the team of Štefan Svetko, which had been awarded only second place in the competition but presented a far less conventional design.53 Hence the high-rise object for Slovakia’s radio broadcasting and administration assumed the well-known form of an inverted pyramid, given its final shape in 1967 and becoming the iconic image not only for its locality but even on a citywide scale. Along with the plan to create the previously mentioned transverse axis with a 90-m-wide street that would run along one side of the radio complex, the architects set down the route of further construction of largescale structures in the vicinity, leading in the direction of today’s Americké námestie. Against Belluš’s original plan, the Technical
47 A more detailed discussion of the idea of representation of power is given e.g. in Potočár, M., 2013, p. 156 – 165. 48
Cited from Ščepánová, S., 2019, p. 96.
49 Built in 1937, the building was demolished in 2002, since it stood too close to the entrance to the new Slovak National Bank.
plánovacího v Bratislavě. Architekt SIA, 48, 1950, no. 8, p. 207.
50 Fully matching the collectivist spirit of the age, the authors were three architectural teams: Josef Havlíček and Karel Filsak from Stavoprojekt in Prague, Josef Hrubý and Zdeňek Pokorný from the Prague institute KAS, and Martin Kusý from Stavoprojekt Bratislava. 51
52
Hruška, E., 1963, p. 14.
53 The winning project by Miloš Chorvát was based on the more conventional solution of a slab tower placed on a rectangular platform.
Editorial: Soutež na Správní budovu Slovenského úřadu
216